There is talk about holding a "Confer 40th reunion" in 2015 in Ann Arbor. The conversation started with a status post from Maya Bernstein and is continuing in a group with the name "Confer 40th Reunion - 2015", both on Facebook.

I also found this in the User:Planning archives. It only mentions Autonote in passing, but is interesting for other reasons:

Jan05/86 22:4275:10) Karl Zinn: Confer has been used in dozens of differentclasses in the last ten years. The important difference this fall,as pointed out by Maya (#9), was initiative of students along withcommitment of resources for undergraduate classes. Finally CRLT can recommend and support practical and widespreaduse of this tool in which we have made (relatively) majorinvestments over the last 15 years.- - - - -Jan06/86 11:5275:11) Christine Wendt: Fifteen? But K4QQ:RP.CONFER wasn't evenborn until 1975!- - - - -Jan18/86 15:0875:12) Karl Zinn: Chris, my response to #11 is somewhat delayed bylong hours helping new classes get started with Confer this term.(Anyone else volunteer to help out?) My interest in conferencing was ignited in '64 by a visit to DougEngelbart at SRI. Anyone remember the big screen (videoprojection) demo he did at FJCC in San Francisco a few years later? The "major investment" by CRLT began about '71 with ProjectExtend's use of various facilities on MTS for communications amongcommunity college users of MTS. I'd have to check my notes to nameall the various things we tried. (Anyone k now about Autonote?)Mostly we adopted conventions for using shared files (relativelycheap and easy) for mail and joint authoring. I recall one of theearly proposals for Merit (back when it was MERIT, and really a"research information triad") was done through such "conferencing"activity. I didn't have time to find my notes on the history of MERIT,MICIS, IUCIUC and the CRLT proposal to the state ('64, I think)when Research News did an issue on Merit, but I know they are stillaround. Bob's contribution in 74-75 (and continuing through the present!)was to make something reliable, economical, functional, easy-to-useand responsive to the evolving needs and interests of users! Bobhas given us "the Ferrari of computer conferencing." (Byte, Dec 85,p184)

Two photos from the 2004 reception for Robert Bartels.Bob Parnes is on the left, Kitty Bridges is on the right, but who is the follow in the middle?

Meet:Students t-shirt (front and back):

Sunday in the Park with Parnes

First annual USER:OPENFORUM and USER:FORUM picnic at Delhi Park, Sunday, 13 July 1986.This is a color version provided by John Dorsey (13th from the left in the front row) of a B&W photo that appeared on page 3 of the U-M Computing News, University of Michigan Computing Center, v.1 #2, 11 August 1986

1995: WebTeach, a web-based asynchronous communication system using
chronological threads in the 'Confer' style originally developed in the
mid 70s by Robert Parnes, was first used in 1995 in the Professional
Development Centre at UNSW.

In the early days collaboration between the MTS sites was accomplished
through a combination of face-to-face site visits, phone calls, the
exchange of documents and magnetic tapes by snail mail, and informal get-togethers at SHARE
or other meetings. Later, e-mail, computer conferencing using Confer
and Forum, network file transfer, and e-mail attachments supplemented
and eventually largely replaced the earlier methods.

Hi Jeff, . . . As to locations of Confer-MTS, my recollection is that they had been installed at UM, UMB, WSU, Alberta, and HP. I submitted a proposal to have it installed at NASA (somewhere in California but I can’t remember where now), but it didn’t get funded. A Unix version of Confer was created and installed at WMU, and that got back ported to Michigan at some point. The Unix version was also used by the Research Library Group for a while. I don’t have any recollection of MSU having licensed MTS or Confer. I suspect Rich could provide a definitive answer to that one.

Best regards, (bob)

From: Jeff OgdenSent: Wednesday, November 17, 2010 4:53 PMTo: bobSubject: Re: can you help me identify someone in a photo?

. . .

Rich remembers MTS being installed at MSU to run Confer at Paul Hunt's instigation), Paul was the MSU CIO at the time. Two other MSU staff members don't remember MTS being installed, but they are bowing to Rich's memory as am I.

I'm pretty sure that MTS was installed at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. I thought it was to run Confer. But perhaps it was just a trial setup. I'll dig around a bit more to see what is written down and what others remember.

-Jeff

On Jan 29, 2012, at 9:27 PM, Bob Parnes wrote:

Hi Zoe and Neda! There was definitely a version of Confer that wascreated for the VAX environment at Western Michigan University. Iremember driving back and forth to Kalamazoo many times to discussand guide the creation of Confer V there. I am pretty sure Confer Vwas created before Confer U. Ron Schubot did a lot of the proddingand tech support to make it happen at WMU, and he did have theadministrativesupport of his computer center director.Norm Grant at WMU wrote all the Confer V code in an amazingly shorttime, as I recall.

. . .

On Jan 29, 2012, at 10:07 PM, Bob Parnes wrote:

Jeff,

The "V" in Confer V was not a numeric indicator as was the II inConfer II. Rather it was used to indicate the VAX [VMS] version, just likethe "U" was used to indicate the UNIX version. Had I known therewould be other Operating System versions back in 1975 when I startedwork on Confer, I might have called the second version (it got namedjust a few months after I created the original draft I called Confer)Confer M rather than Confer II.

But calling it II made sense at the time. The II designation happenedafter I figured out how to add responses to items. I wanted to signalto some faculty who had seen the original primitive "first draft"that I now had something more substantial to look at.Thanks for all your hard work in preserving our little corner ofhistory.

Oh, by the way, there never was a Confer III or Confer IV. I justkept updating Confer II and providing a last change date for itinstead of releasing new roman numeral versions.

Jeff, . . . You are correct on the “few things” you asked me to verify. To amplify on the last thing, Merrill Flood is the one who got me started thinking about Computer Conferencing with lots of initial under-the-radar support from some faculty at the School of Education including Fred Goodman and Lee Collett (but many others including Carl Berger I suspect as well). Karl Zinn was quick to identify the potential significance of what I was undertaking and he then quickly managed to find a position and funding for me at CRLT where I could get a grad student salary from CRLT to support his efforts to disseminate what I was doing to the University and beyond. That is, CRLT did not pay me to develop Confer; that was all done on my own time. Karl’s great skill was recognizing good projects and helping to get them nourished and disseminated. Merrill was able to plant the seed in the first place that I then turned into a project. Fred Goodman and Lee Collett were my mentors inside the School of Education; without their mentoring it is unlikely that a school of education would have put up with what I was doing there as a PhD candidate. There were many others who joined in along the way. The folks at Merit, especially Chris Wendt, deserve special mention as well in convincing me that, early on, I was on to something worthwhile with their adoption of Confer to support their efforts. And, of course, the Computing Center was generous with their support of Confer once it got going.

This feels like I’m writing the acknowledgement that I should have written in my dissertation, but didn’t mostly because I did not yet then have the wisdom of hindsight.

"Politics and Computers" in U-M Computing News, University of Michigan Computing Center, pp. 3-4, v.1, #8, 10 November 1986The use of Confer by Fred Goodman and Edgar Taylor of the School of Education, and Raymond Tanter in Political Science at U-M, in their courses Poll Sci 471, "American Foreign Policy Process" and Poli Sci 353, "Arab-Israeli Conflict."

Conferencing: In concert with Kari Gluski, PAM for
communications and Carol Kamm, project leader for web services, U-M
Online has been investigating web based conferencing options.
The initial plan called for replacing confer (due to expense) by
September.
Following active research for scaleable web based conferencing, the
team concluded the September goal was not doable.
As an interim solution, Confer developer Bob Parnes was contacted.
He has agreed to lower his fee from $2.00 per subscriber to 25 cents.
With the lower fee, U-M Online can afford to stay with Confer until a
suitable web based alternative is available.

Here are some other first-generation conferencing
systems that emerged in the early to mid-1970's:

EMISARI (1971, Murray Turoff, U.S. Office of Emergency
Preparedness.) This was a special-purpose system used for 90 days to
coordinate the Nixon administration's wage-price freeze. It is generally
recognized as the first computer conferencing system.

PLANET (Jacques Vallee, Robert Johansen, and others at the
Institute for the Future in Menlo Park, California.)

Confer (1975, Robert Parnes, University of Michigan.) Confer
is the parent of Caucus, PicoSpan, and YAPP.

Centralized Forums

Centralized forum software originated on mainframes in the early to
mid-1970's with systems like PLATO Notes, Confer, and EIES. These were
designed specifically for group discussion, and they treat messages as
part of an ongoing conversation with some inherent structure. Discussions
are stored on one central computer, and each new message is assigned a
place in the discussion structure immediately upon being posted. Over the
years this line of software has evolved sophisticated features for
managing and participating in conversations.

Within this arena, there is another identifiable subgroup of products
whose designs have been derived from Confer, a system originally developed
in 1975 by Robert Parnes. I call these products "WELL-style"
conferencing systems, because the WELL has been very influential in
spreading this design. There are a number of features that tend to appear
in WELL-style conferencing software, but the most readily identifiable
feature is that it structures discussions as linear chains of responses,
and displays each discussion as a continuous stream of text.

According to
Bob Parnes, architect of the Confer system, "MTS was our
system; it belonged to the University, not to a corporation."

Confer became a common means of communication as students
organized their own conferences and CRLT staff members convinced
instructors to set up course-related conferences.

"MTS and Merit/UMnet allowed many people to communicate
electronically for the first time both one-to-one — using e-mail
— or one-to-many — using e-mail, newsgroups, and conferencing,"
said Christine Wendt, then computer systems consultant for Merit.
"So many people today are impressed by the Internet and the
World Wide Web, but after more than 15 years of conferencing and
e-mail using MTS, I have a feeling of 'been there, done that.'"

E-Mail and Confer

In the mid-1970s, the next great computing revolution on
campus further expanded the U-M MTS community. Bob Parnes,
then a graduate student studying experimental psychology, was
attending a seminar in which Professor Merrill Flood was
discussing the new concepts of e-mail and electronic conferencing
and their use in decision making. Flood had a magnetic tape of
a prototype system and approached Parnes about getting it to
run on MTS. Parnes declined, but offered instead to attempt
writing a similar program for MTS.

Because of a graduate teaching assistant strike, Parnes was
temporarily relieved of his teaching duties and had some extra
time to devote to his experimental system, which he called
"Confer." MTS served as an excellent development
environment for Confer, which was built on top of the MTS file
structure and exploited its filesharing features. According to
Parnes, "I don't think I could have written Confer anywhere
but on MTS."

Confer played a tremendous role in enlarging the electronic
community at the University and in removing the traditional
geographic borders of the classroom and campus. Said Parnes,
"Confer enabled a lot of people to talk together who wouldn't
have otherwise."

The U-M Center for Research on Learning and Teaching was an
early sponsor and proponent of Confer and saw great promise in
it for expanding learning environments. Those working on the
Merit Network were also excited by the potential for Confer,
and they created the MNET:Caucus conference to help users get
quick answers to their questions and take some of the load off
their consulting staff. It turned out that the participants —
both consultants and users — learned a lot from each other
through the conference. MNET:Caucus, a statewide conference,
later became the first campuswide computer conference.

Not only did Confer offer the opportunity for various forms
of group discussion, it also served as the first e-mail system
on campus. The MTS message system (or "$MESSAGE") was
introduced in 1981. Written by Jim Sterken, $MESSAGE allowed MTS
users to send and receive e-mail. Gavin Eadie and Jim Sterken
then enhanced the message system to include remote mail — the
ability to exchange e-mail with users on other systems. The early
e-mail exchange was done over Mailnet. Mailnet was eventually
replaced by BITNET and the Internet.

Although $MESSAGE eventually surpassed Confer as the e-mail
facility of choice on campus, the computer conferencing portion
of Confer continued to thrive. Parnes went on to form his own
company — Advertel Communication Systems, Inc. — which markets
and supports Confer.

A Century of Connectivity at the University of Michigan, Nancy Bartlett, et al., Bulletin No. 55, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, December 2007.

1975: Ph.D. student Robert Parnes developed an innovative conferencing software program called CONFER as “an alternative to face-to-face-communication” for partial fulfillment of his doctoral degree in philosophy. The first CONFER was called K4HS:RP.Confer.

``Confer'' is the name of a conferencing system written in 1975 by
Robert Parnes at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
It was a predecessor to the Picospan and
Caucus conferencing systems.
Confer pioneered many of the design features in Backtalk. [Backtalk is a conferencing system developed by Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss.]

McCord, Alan, "Uses of CONFER at Wayne State University", CHI '81 Proceedings of the joint conference on Easier and more productive use of computer systems. (Part - II): Human interface and the user interface, Volume 1981.

Abstract: Computing and telecommunications were used during the Second
International Congress of the International Society for Technology
Assessment (ISTA) to facilitate the discussion and contribute to the
Congress report. In particular, the telecommunications activity was
designed to enhance interaction on substantive issues and convergence on
conclusions and interpretations. Only incidentally were we conducting
an experiment or trial (with support from NSF) for a community of
potential users of computer-aided conferencing.

p. 232, Confer: One of the first better known systems, Confer was developed in the mid-1970s at The University of Michigan by Dr. Robert Parnes. It has been described as one of the most sophisticated of all the systems. Its development has been closely tied to the MTS operating system (see below) which has to date limited its portability to other types of computer systems.

p. 233, Michigan Terminal System (MTS): A proprietary operating system developed at The University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. It is the operating system for Confer. Several universities around the world are users of this unique computing environment.

Abstract: A provocative session on computer-based learning and
communication environments will be sponsored by SIGCUE. Presentations on
innovative uses of computers in education will include: computer-based
conferencing as a resource and medium (Karl Zinn, et ...

Abstract: This thesis considers how computer-based teleconferencing, as a new communicationstechnology, is changing the way the United States Army performs itspeacetime staffing functions and may be altering traditional command and staffrelationships. It describes the Army's use of teleconferencing and attempts toforecast how this technology will shape headquarters' functions (the preparationof staff studies, plans, and policies) in the future. This thesis examines "whitecollar" productivity within the Army and attempts to analyze how personnel whouse teleconferencing view their work. Concepts explored are: teleconferencingand its impact on overall job effectivene ss; teleconferencing and staff officerefficiency; teleconferencing and its impact on information access; and teleconferencingand its impact on responsibility, authority, and organizationalstructure. A survey was conducted on-line within the ARMY:FORUMNET system. Surveyrespondents represent a cross-section of the Army ranging from general officerto sergeant (N=203 respondents). Results show that computer-based teleconferencingis having a positive effect on staff procedures and command andstaff relationships. Users report teleconferencing has increased their overalljob effectiveness and has made their jobs easier.